Lecture I
By Czeslaw Milosz
How to tell it all? Referring to what chronicles?
Imagine a young man walking by a lake shore
On a hot afternoon. Dragonflies, diaphanous,
Over the rushes as always. But nothing of what's to come
Has yet arrived. Understand: nothing.
Or perhaps it has, but is unfulfilled.
Bodies asigned for wounds, cities for destruction,
Pain of uncounted numbers,each pain one's own.
Concrete for crematoria, States for partitioning,
Assassins drawn by lot: you, and you, and you.
Yes. And the jet. The transistor. The video.
Men on the moon. He walks and doesn't know.
He comes to a little bay, a kind of beach.
People on vacation are there sunbathing.
Gentlemen and ladies, bored, talk about
Who is sleeping with whom, bridge, and a new tango.
That young man is me. I was him, perhaps still am
Though half a century has passed. I remember and don't remember
How they and he were at odds. He is different, alien.
Prisoners of his mind, they flash by and vanish.
He scorns then, a judge, observer.
Thus the sickliness of adolescence
Divines the sickness of an era
That will not end well. Those who are unaware
Deserve to be punished: they wanted only to live.
A wave, bits of reed on gravel, white clouds.
Beyond the water, village roofs, a wood. And imagination.
In it, Jewish towns, a train crossing the flatlands.
Abyss. The earth is swaying. Does it sway only now
When I throw open the labyrinths of time,
As if to know meant to comprehend,
And beyond the window hummingbirds perform their dance?
I should have . . . I should have what fifty-five years ago?
I should have lived in joy. In harmony. In faith. In peace.
As if that had been possible. And later, stupefaction:
Why hadn't they been wiser? It all appears now as a sequence
Of cause and effect. No, that too is doubtful.
Everyone's responsible who ever breathed --
Air? Unreason? Illusion? Idea?
Like everyone who lived there and then, I didn't see clearly.
This I confess to you, my young students.
